Based on his recent comments, former Vice President Dick Cheney is fast becoming one of the most important public figures of the post-Cold War history of the United States. It may be somewhat odd that a man who served as chief of staff to one president and was twice elected vice president without ever seeking (and while repeatedly professing no interest in seeking) the presidency would turn out to be a more consequential political figure than many presidents, but I think that this may turn out to be the case.

Guardian of Presidential Power.

Early in the Bush administration, Vice President Cheney liked to speak of the importance of preserving the prerogatives of the presidential office, including the respect due to the President. He was quoted in the Washington Post as saying that one of his primary roles in the Bush administration was as a guardian of the authority of the office: “We never wanted to allow the closeness of our election to in any way diminish the power of the presidency, lead him to make a decision that [President Bush] needed to somehow trim his sails, and be less than a fully authorized, if you will, commander in chief, leader of our government, president of the United States.”

This solicitude for preserving presidential authority was, as some commentators have noted, a consistent theme of Cheney’s entire career from his chafing at congressional “meddling” in the Ford administration to his authoring the minority report of the Iran-Contra Committee, a sweeping indictment of the Boland Amendment and all other attempts to hold the executive accountable to congressional restraint. Dick Cheney believes not only in the theory of the “unified executive” but in the remarkable conceit that the President is alone responsible for governing and defending the American republic as well as the only competent authority for determining what measures are needed to accomplish those charges.

However, even though he has consistently argued that presidents deserve great deference in setting policy and need not broach any second-guessing from those outside the executive mansion, Cheney has eschewed the dignified reserve that George W. Bush has observed since leaving office and emerged as one of the current president’s most vocal critics. He does not just think that Barack Obama is making poor policy decisions; he thinks that Barack Obama’s decisions are crippling the necessary constitutional prerogatives of his office. Love the Presidency. Hate the President.

We should not be too quick to dismiss him as a curmudgeonly retiree who does not appreciate how the “new kid” does his old job. Vice President Cheney’s understanding of American constitutionalism (or the lack thereof) is not only politically potent but theoretically challenging. It may constitute the major ideological antagonist to President Barack Obama’s brand of pragmatic liberal idealism (and no, I don’t think that phrase is an oxymoron). The contest between these philosophies may well define the next era of party politics in America.

The Nature of Republican Schisms.

In order to evaluate the justice of this sweeping thesis, we first have to consider the character of the schisms that are destroying the Republican Party as we once knew it and the unique position that Dick Cheney occupies within the shifting factions of the Republican opposition. A suggestive, and admittedly incomplete, summary will have to do here:

The recent bout of “tea parties” with their categorical denunciations of taxation may be read as a sign that libertarianism is reemerging from the rock where the Christian Right had buried Ron Paul. I suspect that there is less truth to this view than is commonly supposed.

After all, the tea parties are taking place in a rather unique situation – no new taxes or higher taxes have been levied yet (except on cigarettes). The objections really center on two prongs of President Obama’s agenda, neither of which constitutes an objection to government as such – 1) the extension of national government involvement in the economic mechanisms of society and the expenditure of U.S. moneys (taxed or borrowed) to restructure the economy and 2) the prospect (still somewhat remote) of expanded social programs, particularly in the area of health care. These programs are unpopular with the tea party crowd, but generally approved of by the public as a whole. In fact, the tea party strategy concedes that running against the “socialism” of an economic safety net or guaranteed health care is a political loser these days. Its architects have decided to cast themselves as against the new (but so far hypothetical) taxes that may one day be needed to pay for these programs, at least in part because attacking the programs directly does not seem likely to work.

In this regard, it is worth noting that these protestors were strangely silent during the Bush administration, and they offer virtually no objection to what has been, at least until the last six months, the biggest engine of federal government expansion in the eight years since 9/11 (and arguably the last thirty years since Ronald Reagan’s election), namely our commitment to higher levels of intrusive security measures at home and higher levels of military engagement in foreign theaters abroad.

Ron Paul and the true libertarians in the Republican camp have objected vigorously to both, but in this regard, Dick Cheney’s Republicanism stands in very stark contrast to the libertarian strain. Deficit spending is alright, and perhaps even necessary, but only for certain types of priorities, and it may be more than just chance that the priorities that do merit growth of federal spending and government power are those that fall under the purview of the presidency.

Meanwhile, the Christian Right seems peculiarly toothless. Iowa is on the verge of allowing gay marriage, and in Vermont, even Republican state legislators would not join a Republican Governor in opposing it. Dick Cheney himself is on record as favoring gay marriage. That the Christian Right would accept him as a major Republican spokesman itself speaks volumes. Furthermore, expansion of stem cell research has provoked some dissent, but it mostly turns out to be quibbling over the details of the program rather than the black-white moral distinctions that used to really get Republicans animated. The opposition to the overturning of the gag rule may not be gagged, but it has certainly been muted. Rafts of polls show that younger voters simply are much less likely to be interested in policing the boundaries of personal morality, and the future of an electoral strategy grounded in these issues is dimming.

Thus, I would suggest that moral issues are not at present capable of animating a national political party and that the “tea parties” (which are the most obvious sign of life in the Republican camp) may be more about who should run the government (hint, not that taxing Congress) than about whether we should have a government. The Republican party might just be casting itself in Cheney’s image as the party of executive powers and foreign policy focus.

Cheney is a “big government conservative” in almost the mirror image of the way that David Brooks called Barack Obama a “big government conservative” in the New York Times. Brooks claims Obama speaks of growing government to focus on the quotidian concerns of middle-class American families. Cheney wants a “big government” that will leave those concerns to the private sphere (except where surveillance of those activities might enhance national security) and will focus on the security issues that middle-class American families can neither handle for themselves nor adequately comprehend.

Dick Cheney’s big government is based almost wholly within the unified control of the executive branch. It is, in no small measure, grounded upon a Machiavellian understanding of the world in which threats are omnipresent and thus justify, and even require, vigorous and ruthless governments capable of suppressing hostile challenges.

In a February interview with Politico, Cheney said, “The United States needs to be not so much loved as it needs to be respected. Sometimes, that requires us to take actions that generate controversy. I’m not at all sure that that’s what the Obama administration believes.”

If you doubt the Machiavellian tone, compare it to this famous passage from the Prince: “Upon this [account of the dangerous passions of human beings] a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved.”

I think the most stunning element of this justification for executive power is how far it falls from the oft-repeated Republican insistence on “strict construction of the Constitution” and “fidelity to the original intention.” The idea that the circumstances of the modern world necessitate the consolidation of power in an executive capable of being feared (Call it “respect,” because we will bomb you back to the stone age if you diss us!) is to admit that whatever constitutional restrictions the Framers may have placed on executive power (and they did place it second in the arrangement of constitutional powers) are decisively trumped by the necessities of modern world threats. Any notion that the constitution is about dividing powers to ensure accountability is dismissed because accountability is a luxury that we just can’t afford.

Viewed in this regard, Dick Cheney’s recent FOIA requests (for the release of CIA documents that supposedly prove that torture works in securing useful information) constitute one of the most absurdist pieces of political theater imaginable. If he were still in the West Wing, he would tell a FOIA court where to stuff their requests and laugh about it; now he is the one filing them. On the one hand, this runs counter to his understanding of the importance of protecting the prerogatives of the executive branch, but on the other hand, he claims that (just this once) the American people need to be forced to look at just how dangerous the world is and how effective unfettered executive governance can be. By using the mechanisms of law to pull new and frightening threats into the open so that they can be part of the “honest debate” about Bush-era detention and interrogation practices, he is trying to paint a picture of the world in which his Machiavellian understanding of America’s plight is so horrifying that his counter-idealist (and extra-constitutional) vision of the American “republic” may be justified.

Of course, once it is justified (and perhaps a new Republican devotee of the unified executive school is sworn into office in 2013), we will be back to keeping all of this quiet and controlled under the tight hand of a president who listens to Dick Cheney. He is encouraging a certain type of selective openness to re-assert the importance of keeping things closed. He wants Americans to see just enough of what is happening (or at least what has happened) in the dangerous world for them to be open to his philosophy of powerful, and unaccountable, executive governance.

This is truly the counterpoint to what I have called Obama’s pragmatic liberal idealism. Obama is an idealist in that he takes “ideals” and particularly the ideals of liberalism, broadly conceived, quite seriously. People everywhere should be “free” – free of intrusive law enforcement watching their every move, free of foreign militaries patrolling their streets, free from crippling economic dislocations and the insecurity of not being able to afford medical care that they need. But Obama is pragmatic in the sense that he embraces these ideals not only as worthy goals that we should enjoy when we can “afford” them but as the best means to insure our security. His is a hopeful vision that would put its emphasis in reading Machiavelli on another paragraph in which the Florentine warns that while you might find security in being feared, there is only insecurity when you are hated.

Barack Obama‘s recent efforts to walk back some of the most aggressive actions of the last administration proceed from the assumption that a nation as powerful as the United States will surely generate hatred if we use our power to the utmost and without a due regard of the opinions of others. For Dick Cheney that hatred is the price of authority and should be willingly paid. For Barack Obama it is acting in ways that incur such hatred that is the source of our insecurity.

The current argument over the historical question about whether or not harsh detention and interrogation policies prevented terror attacks ultimately boils down to very divergent views about this larger philosophical question about the character of the world and the limits of constitutional governance. Where you stand on the philosophical issue likely dictates your reading of the highly ambiguous evidence that is (or may become) available. For this reason, I suspect that if Dick Cheney’s FOIA requests are honored and the incidents that he wishes to publicize are published, few minds will change. Those inclined to see the world in Cheney’s terms will be confirmed in their fears of Obama’s weakness and naivete; those who see the world in Obama’s terms will be unimpressed.

Interestingly, both of these contending schools tend to claim Abraham Lincoln as their founder, each with some justice. Dick Cheney’s broadside defense of executive power in the Iran-Contra dissent repeatedly invokes Lincoln as the source for the broad, extra-constitutional executive authority, like that which he exercised in the early days of the Civil War. For Cheney, Lincoln’s actions are the proof that the president’s powers must be equal to all threats.

Barack Obama has repeatedly styled himself as Abraham Lincoln’s heir, in no small measure because he shares Lincoln’s commitment to following “the better angels of our nature.” If we expect the United States to enjoy the moral power of its commitment to justice and the rights of human beings, an idea that if honestly embraced and practiced might “spread and deepen its influence, and augment the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere,” we must practice that commitment and show the world that we mean it. As we all should have known from the February 2008 “race speech” if not before, Obama’s philosophy is hopeful. If we expect the best of people, we may often find it. The world (and maybe even Congress) may be improved if we demonstrate that we are willing to stand on noble principles and that we expect them to do the same. In this philosophy, the constitution serves as both an inspirational statement of the principles to which we are pledged and salutary check on our first impulses to compromise them whenever the principled stand seems to demand too much of us or offer too little security in a dangerous world.

In Dick Cheney’s philosophy, the world is bleak and dangerous and is not liable to improve. The constitution is therefore at best a guideline; it is to be honored mostly in the breach and never when circumstances call for more drastic actions or more unified control of power than the constitution countenances. “This is why God created John Yoo, to justify what we need when we need it.”

There are very honest policy differences on appropriate levels of taxing and appropriate targets of spending as well as many other issues both foreign and domestic, but in terms of the broad ideological divisions in the parties, we may be witnessing a new alignment that is grounded in disagreements about how urgently we need broad executive power in the modern world. If that proves to be a durable and re-aligning division, Dick Cheney may prove to be the most effective counterpole to Barack Obama’s pragmatic liberal idealism, the rock on which a new, anti-Obama Republican party will be founded. Of course, it must be tough for Dick Cheney to find himself constantly having to cast doubt on the ability of a president to run the government. Strangely enough, the party of presidential government, now out of the executive branch, may conclude that they have to destroy a presidency to save it.